The Conference of Religious of Ireland has said it wants to help Dublin Corporation identify land owned by religious orders which might be used to build social housing.
A senior Dublin housing official, Mr Brendan Kenny, said on RTE yesterday that the corporation had written to religious institutions asking if they had any land they might donate or sell to help deal with the city's housing crisis.
A CORI spokesman, Father Sean Healy, said the conference, which groups all Ireland's major Catholic orders, was "very sympathetic to the situation of housing crisis".
He said CORI had informed its members about the request. "We will be glad to establish contact between the corporation and any religious congregation, when the corporation identifies land which it might be interested in for local authority housing purposes." Father Healy said that in recent years several congregations had given away land for housing homeless people and travellers which was "worth millions of pounds". He gave examples of land at George's Hill, near Capel Street, given by the Presentation Sisters to Focus Housing; "substantial property" in Finglas given to Focus Housing by the Holy Faith Sisters; and sites in Stoneybatter, James's Street and Sandymount given by the Irish Sisters of Charity to Focus Housing and St Vincent de Paul.
He said the Mercy Sisters had recently sold property at Inchicore to the corporation for housing for far less than the market price.
On the other hand, some religious orders in Dublin have sold property for very large sums for private housing in recent years. Before Christmas it was reported that an order of nuns, the Religious of Christian Education, had sold a 7.1-acre site beside Our Lady's School in Templeogue for £14 million. The order said it would fund projects for educationally disadvantaged young people from the proceeds.
Mr Kenny said yesterday he expected this year's corporation housing needs assessment to show more than 6,000 families on the waiting list, compared to 4,000 in 1996 and 5,000 in 1993. He said the boom in property prices was forcing people who would have previously bought houses to go on to public housing waiting lists.
On Monday Dublin City Council passed a motion declaring a housing emergency in the city and calling on the Government to allocate extra funding to deal with it. Two Labour councillors proposed an amendment calling on the religious authorities to play their part in alleviating the situation by negotiating with the corporation to sell available land they own.